Duke Kunshan conference on Environmental Humanities in Asia: Environmental Justice and Sustainable Citizenship May 22-24, 2017 Draft Agenda (V4) – April 24, 2017 Environmental Justice and Sustainable Citizenship Duke Global Asia Initiative and Duke Kunshan University May 22 – 24, 2017 The Global Asia Initiative GAI) at Duke together with DKU will hold a conference on Environmental Humanities in Asia May 22-24, 2017. GAI has been preparing for this conference for a year and we held a preliminary workshop to set the agenda and themes for the conference on Jan 22-23, 2017. The conference is to be titled, “Environmental Justice and Sustainable Citizenship” and will be among the first environmental humanities in Asia conference possibly to be held anywhere. In this first year of the conference series, we will focus on comparable and connected issues regarding the environment in China and India. RATIONALE: Why sustainable citizenship and what does it mean? The term citizenship can best be understood historically as it has developed into the present. Over the last couple of centuries, it developed from the rights and duties between the nation-state and subject in the civic and military spheres. Since the middle of the twentieth century, it has expanded to include a set of social and economic rights (right to food, education, health, etc) of individuals to be protected by law. In deepening this realm of rights in welfare theory, thinkers, most notably, Amartya Sen developed the notion of ‘capabilities’ afforded by society and state to humans/citizens as the criterion for the exercise of rights and freedom. In the absence of the apparatus to generate such capabilities, citizens’ rights could remain merely on paper. Philosophically, the enhancement of capabilities rather than a focus on maximizing growth or utility may be considered a more appropriate goal for a planet with finite resources. These arguments gain particular force when applied to a sustainable environment and what it would mean to have rights of citizens to a protected environment and fair share of sustainable resource use. While advocating the capabilities argument, the economist Tim Jackson has urged that capabilities and rights must be bound on the one hand by the scale of the global population and on the other by the finite ecology of the planet. In order for the capabilities argument to provide justice not only for the poor of the planet but for the environment, it is necessary to re- evaluate the basis for true human flourishing. In these ways, we may return to such normative goals as Leopold’s Land Ethic while also attending to the vast numbers of humans across the world who are in reality excluded from genuine citizenship rights. The theme of sustainable citizenship and environmental justice thus offers a wide agenda of research to pursue in the environmental humanities of Asia. The rights of citizens to be able to achieve their goals of livelihood, education and freedoms is matched by the research on what it Duke Kunshan conference on Environmental Humanities in Asia: Environmental Justice and Sustainable Citizenship May 22-24, 2017 Draft Agenda (V4) – April 24, 2017 means to have a sustainable planet. The preservation of biodiversity; the value of animal life; the protection of our home and work place versus degrading other environments; the problems of governance and vested interests; the means – whether by governmental, activist or aesthetic—to enable and promote sustainable justice; the exploration of alternative modes, historical and contemporary, of human-nature relations; the inquiry into the optimal means of conserving and sharing scarce resources whether by spiritual or secular means, are some of the topics undertaken by the workshop participants. In this project, we understand citizenship not merely as an abstract set of rights, but seek to grasp how these rights may be intertwined with a deeper sense of belonging linked to practices and values of home and the landscape, animals and spirits, fairness and resilience. Are modern resources, such as ‘rights’ and civil society always compatible with or capable of furthering or adjudicating (dispensing justice to) these values? The workshop in Jan 22-23 addressed several of these issues and found them to be worth investigating in greater depth and extending the dialogue to researchers and scholars in China and India. PLENARY SESSION: What can Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences do for Environmental Studies? Chair: Prasenjit Duara, Oscar Tang Professor & Director, Global Asia Initiative, Duke Univ Fanren Zeng 曾繁仁校长 Former President, Shandong University "Cross-cultural Eco-aesthetics: Deconstructing the Traditional Chinese Aesthetic Category of ‘Sheng-sheng’ (or Flourishing of Life) 跨文化研究视野中的中西生态美学 ----在比较视野中 对中国传统“生生”美学的解读 (Full paper will be available in English and Chinese). Shuyuan Lu 鲁枢元教授 Professor and Director of Research Center for Eco-Cultural Institute of Science, Huanghe Science & Technology College "Ecology, Religion and Modernization: Nature and Culture on Mt. Fangjing” 生态·宗教与现代 化进程——从梵净山的自然与文化说起 (Interpreter for Profs, Lu & Zeng will be Prof Chia-ju Chang) Duke Kunshan conference on Environmental Humanities in Asia: Environmental Justice and Sustainable Citizenship May 22-24, 2017 Draft Agenda (V4) – April 24, 2017 The main peak of the Wuling Mountains, Mt. Fanjing, is one of the first sites to be designated by UNESCO’s "Humans and Biosphere” program as a natural preserve. It consists of two distinct features: first of all, both the forests in the mountains and natural resources are well protected; secondly, it has a long religious tradition. Mt. Fanjing is the home for the famous no. 5 sacred site—Maitreya Bodhimanda—but also the fountain place of one of the most primitive religions called Nuo. Compared with other creatures, the superiority and fortune of humans lie in their ownership of the earth’s "spiritual circle.” However, human society is now faced with all the ecological dilemmas that are causing its own demise. Something has gone wrong with this "spiritual circle" that humanity creates. As the slogan goes: "The protection of spiritual environment will lead to world harmony." The state of mind determines the well-being of ecosystem and environment. The smog in our environment derives from our spiritual smog; we as human beings must first solve our inner spiritual problems in order to better deal with external ecological problems. Many religious cultures are fused with the natural world and human’s natural self, especially in Eastern religions and the so-called “primitive religions.” To create an eco-society in the Age of the Anthropocene, mending the spiritual circle of the Earth's deep ecological system, the Maitreya Bodhimanda, as part of the Mt. Fanjing's Buddhist culture and the adjacent local, folk belief and religion called the "Nuo culture" serve as a concrete case study. Yih-Ren Lin Professor, Taipei Medical University Traditional Territory Mapping as a Way of Revealing Ecological Citizenship Map is not just about space, but rather identity and social relations. This study will show how the indigenous Tayal people in Taiwan create a mapping event to resolve forest resources boundary conflict and dialogue with the state. Furthermore, through the event the Tayal indigenous people also reveal who they are and their close ecological relationship with the land. The concept of indigenous and ecological citizenship will be discussed in the paper. This study is based on the researcher’s long-term action-oriented participatory study with the Tayal tribe, the third largest indigenous group in Taiwan. Oral history, rituals, resources survey, and mapping of their traditional territory were recorded along with the social actions in their communities. The event is resulted from an illegal logging of a precious cypress tree in the state forest. While the offenders including some indigenous Tayal villagers were accused of the state, the Tayal indigenous council decides to apply their own social norm to deal with crime, simply breaking their law of invading other village’s forest resources. All sub-groups of the Tayal tribe from different river-basins were called to discuss and witness the trial. The event is called “Sbalay” Duke Kunshan conference on Environmental Humanities in Asia: Environmental Justice and Sustainable Citizenship May 22-24, 2017 Draft Agenda (V4) – April 24, 2017 which has a double meaning of “seeking truth” and “reconciliation”. The major parts of the event to satisfy the causes including mapping of traditional territory, singing of oral migratory history, circling witness, pig sacrifice, and solidarity ritual will be discussed. This paper concludes that the indigenous way of natural resources conflict resolution show a land ethics and social identity that is strong enough to demonstrate their ecological citizenship worthy of reflection but unfortunately ignored by the Taiwan government until now. Dan Guttman Clinical Professor of Environmental Studies and Law, New York University – Shanghai The Global Vernacular of Governance: Translating Between China and US Environmental OS: A Core Task for Humanities There is now a global English language vernacular of “governance.” In relation to environmental challenges, students, scholars, practitioners and conferees in Beijing and Washington (and other locale) use terms like “transparency,” “NGOs,” “public interest law,” “sustainability” and “awareness,” when discussing global and local environmental challenges. But do